    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [December 13, 1993]
    [Pages 2165-2169]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Fundraiser for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in New York
    City
    December 13, 1993

        Thank you. Thank you very much, Senator Moynihan and Liz.
        You know, before I met Pat Moynihan, I actually thought I knew
    something about government. Now I just feel like I'm getting a grade
    every time I talk in front of him. [Laughter] It's not always a good
    one.
        I am honored to be here with Liz and with Pat, honored by the
    partnership that they have kept and the faith they have kept with the
    American people as well as with their own family for 40 years, deeply
    honored to have the chance to serve as your President while Senator
    Moynihan is the chairman of that committee which makes a quorum if he's
    there and I, his messenger, are there--I'm his messenger, I think.
    [Laughter]
        A few months ago, when the fate of our economic plan was hanging in
    the balance and we didn't have a vote to spare, there were people in
    Washington who said, and I quote, ``The very survival of this President
    now rests squarely on the shoulders of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, chairman
    of the Senate Finance Committee.'' Thank God he didn't shake me off.
    [Laughter] We made it here tonight.
        And tonight, if this were a normal time, I would come and talk about
    the things that we often talk about: about the new GATT round that
    Senator Moynihan mentioned, about the fact that the economic program we
    passed which was so controversial has now been largely shorn of its
    false myths, the front page of the Wall Street Journal today saying that
    they said there were no spending cuts in it, but guess what? They cut a
    lot of spending, they cut a lot of entitlements, they cut and cut and
    cut. That's the Wall Street Journal, hardly the house organ of my
    administration--[laughter]--saying that. And of course, the markets have
    largely spoken with lower interest rates and inflation and higher rates
    of investments and a 19-year low in late home mortgage payments,
    millions of Americans refinancing their homes, more jobs in the private
    sector in 10 months than in the previous 4 years. I'd like to talk all
    about that. I do believe that by and large our country is going back in
    the right direction economically. And with all of our difficulties, and
    Lord knows they're plenty, we are now the envy of the other advanced
    industrial countries. In Europe and Japan they're having far worse
    troubles than we are at this moment. Not that I wish that on them; if
    they were doing better we would be,

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    too.
        I'd like to talk about how the image I had of Senator Moynihan--and
    even after working with him a little bit, but before I became
    President--was different than reality, something I'm very sympathetic
    with. You know, I thought, ``Well, Moynihan has got an IQ of 300; he
    can't be bothered with the dirty details of practical politics. But if I
    hang around long enough I'll get four or five things that we can move
    the world with.'' And then he started wearing me out about Penn Station
    and New York's Medicaid match rate, and Lord knows, there is nobody who
    works me worse in an old-fashioned way for his constituents than Daniel
    Patrick Moynihan and does a better job of it. So I could give a speech
    about that, you know. But tonight we have to talk about what Mr.
    Chairman mentioned. The Washington Monthly once described Pat Moynihan's
    career as one long and exhilarating assault on conventional wisdom. He
    told us more than a decade ago what would happen if we kept increasing
    spending and cutting revenues at the same time. And sure enough, we
    quadrupled our debt in 12 years.
        A decade before its collapse, Senator Moynihan said the Soviet Union
    was doomed. He also wrote a very powerful prediction and later turned it
    into a book called ``Pandemonium,'' about what would happen when you
    strip the veneer of communism off those troubled lands.
        But long before I ever ran for President on my platform of
    opportunity and personal responsibility and renewing the bonds of
    community in this country, he had been warning us, as you heard tonight,
    reading from that stirring article now 28 years old, which could have
    been written last week. He has been for a generation the champion of the
    American family, not one of those politicians who use slogans like
    ``family values'' to divide us but who really tried to live out those
    values and to find ways to vote for programs and push ideas and change
    actions that would help ordinary people in this State and this Nation to
    keep their own families together and to raise their children and to be
    rewarded if they worked hard and played by the rules.
        I have read over and over and over again that wonderful passage
    which Senator Moynihan quoted to you tonight. I can tell you what most
    of you already know. One of the things that impresses me about it,
    coming as I do from the kind of family I come from, is that that passage
    was written 28 years ago not by a trust fund baby telling people on food
    stamps how to live but by a son of Hell's Kitchen, a onetime
    longshoreman, a person who knows what it means to see chaos and
    difficulty and adversity firsthand.
        Here's what I think we're up against today. I believe that in every
    traditional way I could do a good job as your President, and the
    Congress could continue to support me. And notwithstanding the press
    reports to the contrary, it has now apparently been established that
    they have supported me more faithfully than they have any President in
    his first year in 40 years, since they've been keeping these statistics.
    I'm very grateful for that. We can work on increasing the growth rate.
    We can work on bringing the deficit down. We can work on rebuilding the
    training systems of our country. We can pass a new health care program,
    and Lord knows we need to. We can do these things. But unless, unless we
    face the fact that year in and year out we are losing an enormous
    percentage of our people to our common future and that they, in turn,
    are making the rest of us much more miserable and less free and less
    hopeful in our own lives, this country will not become what it ought to
    be.
        I look into these places that break our collective heart, and I see
    the collapse of economic opportunity, the collapse of families, and the
    loss of supporting community institutions that used to bind up the
    wounds of so many individual kids in trouble in every community that had
    them when I was a boy. I wonder which came first. I don't think it's
    relevant anymore to know what was the chicken and what was the egg. I do
    know that back in April Senator Moynihan said that, in talking about the
    differences here between 1993 and 50 years before, he said, and I quote,
    ``In 1943 the illegitimacy rate in New York City was 3 percent. Last
    year it was 45 percent--a lot of poor people here in 1943.''
        When Pat Moynihan wrote the article that he just quoted from a few
    moments ago, the illegitimacy rate among white Americans was 1 in 20,
    among African-Americans, was 1 in 5. Since that time, in 28 years, the
    rate among black Americans has tripled, the rate among white Americans
    has quadrupled, most all of it concentrated among people who are very
    poor, not very well educated, and in what I have come to call an
    increasingly outer class, estranged from the rest of us. If we keep
    going

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    at this rate, within a decade more than half the children born in this
    country will not be born into a family where there is or has been a
    marriage.
        Now, he's been talking about this for 28 years. What else has
    happened in 28 years? Well, for 20 years, because of the pressures of
    the global economy and because of our inadequate response to them, the
    wages of middle class Americans have more or less been stagnant. But
    every year there are more and more people who are poor, people who are
    not working, and people who are working and still poor. And that's what
    I meant when I said, you take the most troubled neighborhoods in this
    country, most people who live in them work hard for a living, don't
    break the law, doing the best they can, and in some ways, are the real
    heroes in this country because most of them are working hard and still
    just barely getting by. And they deserve our honor and our respect.
        But the economic opportunities that once beckoned people to our
    cities have long gone for many middle class people who didn't have a lot
    of education. When you lose both family and work, the two things that
    most of us organize our lives around, you create a vacuum in any
    society. And, as with any other vacuum, nature abhors it; it will be
    filled. People cannot live in total chaos. Some alternative
    organizations will take root. And what has happened in our country is
    that in places which we have permitted to be without family and work,
    where the community organizations have folded up tent and left behind
    them, where very often only the churches are there standing alone
    against the deluge, and the people in the social services overpowered,
    and the police outmanned, what happens is that gangs take root as a form
    of social organization and drugs take root not just as a form of self-
    destruction but as an economic endeavor. And then, as an enforcement
    mechanism, violence comes along in even greater amounts.
        And now, because we have permitted, by a flight of, in my view,
    collective insanity, even teenagers to be better armed than police in
    most of our big cities, you see a dramatic increase just in the last
    decade in the death rate of young people who are shot. Why is that?
    Because they're more likely to be shot by assault weapons like the kind
    that was used on the Long Island Rail Road a few days ago. A study came
    out right after that horrible incident, chronicling one of our biggest
    cities in the Middle West, saying that 100 percent of the increase in
    the death rate from gunshot wounds among teenage boys was due to the use
    of assault weapons with rapid cartridges, so they had more bullets in
    their bodies. It wasn't very complicated.
        So I would argue to you we have, first of all, seen a vacuum
    develop. It happened over a generation, and anybody that tells you it
    can be turned around with a lot of words or even good actions in a
    moment is wrong. There are good people out there now standing against
    the tide, doing their best. I call to your attention the article on the
    cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine yesterday about that brave
    policeman. Gosh, I'd like to meet that guy. If you haven't read it, you
    ought to go read it, talking about how one person still can make a
    difference in restoring some sanity and safety and reinforcing values in
    people's lives.
        And so we come, those of us who are in Washington running your
    business, Senator Conrad and Senator Lautenberg, Chairman Moynihan and
    I, we come to work every day knowing that we almost have two tasks.
    We've got these rational challenges: get the deficit down, get
    investment up, train the work force better, expand trade, do things that
    will work. And for most of us it will really work. But knowing that
    underneath that there is this erosion taking place where a lot of people
    are just being lost, to themselves and to the rest of us. Those kids
    that were singing to us up there tonight, they sang ``God Bless
    America,'' they sang the national anthem, and they deserve for it to be
    true. They deserve for it to be true.
        I don't want to get into a lot of programs tonight. We got the Brady
    bill done. We've got the crime bill coming up. It really does make a
    difference how many police are on the street if they are well trained.
    We have to do more on the drug front. We have to deal with health care,
    in part because this crime and violence is a public health problem. But
    I don't want to talk so much about programs. It is just to ask you to
    leave here tonight, if you are really going to give your money to
    reelect this man, which you must do because he is a national treasure,
    you should leave here tonight determined to do what you can to create a
    political constituency to make it possible for him to make the ideas
    that have been popping in his mind for a generation real in the lives of
    our people.
        In other words, what I'm asking you to do

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    tonight is you don't have to agree that whatever we decide to do on the
    assault weapons ban is right around the edges, or whatever. But you
    should leave here tonight far more intolerant than you came here of some
    of the conditions which obtain in this country. Last winter Senator
    Moynihan wrote, and I quote, ``We have been redefining deviancy so as to
    exempt much conduct previously stigmatized.'' We have been, quote, to
    use his phrase, ``defining deviancy down,'' below the threshold of
    acceptability. Then he said in more blunt language, ``We're getting used
    to a lot of behavior that is not good for us.''
        Now, just today there was a Justice Department study that says 20
    percent of the students surveyed in certain schools in high crime areas
    carried guns to school on a regular basis, and 83 percent of juvenile
    offenders have used or carried guns prior to their arrest. That is just
    one example. We tolerate all kinds of things nobody else would put up
    with. Why, if we are so smart, would we tolerate, for example, having
    the only advanced country in the world with a health care system that
    spends 40 percent more than everybody else and covers fewer people and
    instead of spending it on pharmaceuticals or doctors or nurses, spends
    more and more of it on paperwork than anybody else? Why would we do
    that? Why do we put up with that? Why aren't we free enough to know that
    we have got to invest in policies that will promote work over welfare
    and family over solitude and community over division? We know better
    than this. And we have just become so callous because, basically, this
    country has worked pretty well for the rest of us. But I'm telling you,
    it's coming back on the rest of us.
        Tonight before I came down here, I called and asked if those three
    men who had the guts to go subdue the man who did the shooting on the
    Long Island Rail Road would come up and see me before I came down to the
    dinner. I just wanted to see them and talk to them and ask them how they
    were feeling and figure out, why did these guys do this, take
    responsibility? Suppose the guy had gotten the clip in the gun quicker.
    You know, it looks now like they couldn't have been hurt. Do you think
    they knew that then? In the flash of an eye were they all that certain
    that they couldn't have been shot? I don't think so. They did something.
    They took responsibility. And they came from fine families. One has four
    children; one has three children; the other, a younger man, brought his
    parents and his brother and sister. They had a lot to lose. They acted.
    They took responsibility. They saved lives. We ought to be proud of
    them.
        So they started talking about how each one of them made the
    decision, almost simultaneously and not together, to do this. And
    finally they just knew it was insane not to act. And so they took some
    chance, and they acted. And all three of them said to me, as they looked
    around at their families, that they now realized how fragile this
    country was and how no one was safe from violence but how they all had
    to have an interest in what happened to everybody else. And they
    volunteered; they said, ``You know, Mr. President, if you're going to
    really try to do something about crime and violence, you think there's
    something we can do, call us. We'd like to help.'' In the moment of that
    encounter they all of a sudden realized that by a simple act of heroism,
    they had also come to an understanding which now imposed
    responsibilities on them they didn't feel before they did it.
        And that's what I ask of you. Do you really like Senator Moynihan?
    Do you really admire him? If you really agree with all of the things
    that he's written, if you think the time has come to stop worrying about
    what you feel is politically correct and just say what you believe and
    try to get this country back together again and start saving these
    children again, then you must become more intolerant of things that we
    take for granted. We cannot permit this country to continue to waste the
    lives of a whole generation of children.
        I just want to make one more point. I ran for President because I
    thought the country was going in the wrong direction economically and
    because I thought we were coming apart when we ought to be coming
    together. I think we've done a good job of beginning to change
    economically. And I can't make us come back together all by myself. This
    has got to be a deal we do together. I am not giving you a bunch of
    negative talk. I am a congenital optimist. But I don't believe public
    officials serve the public interest by giving happy talk when hard news
    is called for or by using tough facts to divide people instead of unite
    them.
        So in the intolerance I ask for, I ask for your intolerance of
    conditions, not of people. Remember those kids you heard singing tonight

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    when you go home. There's just millions of them out there, and they're
    bright and good. They can do anything that they have to do to take this
    country into the 21st century, if we can simply do what we have to do to
    stop some of the crazy things that we have permitted. Don't expect it to
    happen overnight. This family degeneration has happened over 30 years.
    The wages have been stagnant for 20 years. The deficit has been
    exploding, and investment in productive things have been declining for
    12 years. We do not have to do it overnight. But we must become
    intolerant in a consistent way, in a compassionate way, and we must
    believe that what worked for so many of us will work for tomorrow's
    children, too. If we believe that and we act on it, then our intolerance
    can give our country a new birth.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 9 p.m. at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. In his
    remarks, he referred to Elizabeth Moynihan, the Senator's wife.