    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [December 3, 1993]
    [Pages 2094-2102]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 2094]]

    Remarks to the Democratic Leadership Council
    December 3, 1993

        Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Senator Breaux, and ladies
    and gentlemen, thank you for that warm welcome. It's wonderful to be
    back here. I want to thank John Breaux for his leadership of the DLC,
    his constancy, and his friendship and support to me in this last
    challenging year. I want to congratulate Dave McCurdy, who has been one
    of our most faithful members for a long time, on his upcoming leadership
    of the DLC.
        I want to say how wonderful it is for me to see so many of you, my
    friends from all across America here, particularly some of my friends
    from New Hampshire I see in the audience. Hillary spent yesterday in New
    Hampshire and came home gloating that she had been there and I hadn't.
    Thank you very much.
        What's Bruno doing over here? Are you segregating him?
        I have given a lot of thought to what I ought to say here today. It
    was 8 or 9 years ago now that--well, almost 9 years ago--after the
    Democrats had lost yet another Presidential election, that a group of
    Democrats gathered to try to sharply define what we stood for and where
    we wanted our party to go. It was clear that we needed an infusion of
    new ideas and new energy, a new direction and reinvigoration into the
    party that most of us belong to by heritage, instinct, and conviction.
        My wife used to tell me--I repeated often on the campaign trail--
    that insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting
    a different result. But we decided we would try some new things and see
    if we could produce some different results, because we knew that our
    country needed a new direction. After all, in the previous 12 years we
    had seen the quadrupling of the deficit, the stagnation of wages,
    profound economic and social problems in this country going unaddressed,
    and middle class Americans continuing to stay with our opponents in the
    other party largely because they felt we could not be trusted to promote
    their economic interests or their values and our policies here at home,
    to promote our national interests abroad or to give them a Government
    that gave them honest value for the hard-earned dollars they put into it
    in taxes.
        In the Democratic Leadership Council we always understood that for
    our politics and our policies to move this Nation, we had to express the
    basic values of mainstream America and promote those economic interests.
    The heart and soul of the American experiment has always been a
    personally secure and growing middle class, challenged to achieve new
    opportunities, challenged to be part of a larger community, challenged
    ever more to assume the new responsibilities of each new age.
        The American dream that we were all raised on is a simple but
    powerful one: If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be
    given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you.
    Throughout our history our party has been the fulcrum that allowed
    working people to lift themselves up into the middle class. And we know
    that if we're to be true to our historic mission we must be the party of
    the values and the interests of the middle class and, more importantly,
    the values and the interests of those who want to become part of the
    growing middle class and the American dream. We must fight their fight.
    We must give voice to their concerns. We must give them the chance to
    build security while embracing change. And above all, we must honor
    those basic values of opportunity, responsibility, and community, of
    work and family and faith. This is what it means, in my view, to be a
    new Democrat. I was proud to campaign as one, I'm proud to govern as
    one.
        Because we are Democrats we believe in our party's historic values
    of opportunity, social justice, and an unshakable commitment to the
    interests of working men and women and their children. Because we are
    new Democrats we promote those old values in new ways. We believe in
    expanding opportunity, not Government. We believe in empowerment, not
    entitlement. We believe in leading the world, not retreating from it. We
    believe that the line between domestic and foreign policy is becoming
    increasingly blurred as the interests and the future of every American
    and every city and hamlet in this country is increasingly caught up with
    events that happen beyond our borders. And most of all, we believe in
    individual responsibil-

    [[Page 2095]]

    ity and mutual obligation, that Government must offer opportunity to all
    and expect something from all, and that whether we like it or not, we
    are all in this battle for the future together.
        With that vision and those values, I believe that these ideas are
    beginning to change our Nation. When I was preparing this speech last
    night, I came across a talk I gave back in March of 1990 when I became
    the chairman of the DLC, and I found a few words I wanted to repeat
    today.
        I said that everyone hopes that the 1990's will see a political
    renaissance for the National Democratic Party. Every one of us knows we
    can't realize all our goals until we elect a Democratic President, but I
    believe that in the end any resurgence for the Democrats depends upon
    the intellectual resurgence of our party. That's another way of saying
    that ideas matter.
        If you look at the elections in the last several months, it seems to
    me the real message of them has been lost in the argument about party
    labels, and we don't win 100 percent of them. People say, ``Well, they
    should have won the ones they won. What about the ones they lost?'' Look
    what the message was in Dennis Archer's victory in Detroit--one of our
    strong DLC members who will be here later--or in my friend Bob Lanier's
    91 percent victory in Houston. He said, ``Elect me. I will stop spending
    money on this, and I will instead spend money on police, and I will
    deploy them properly and the crime rate will go down.'' And sure enough,
    it did, and 91 percent of the people reelected him. Look at the common
    threads that run through all these elections and you will see the ideas
    that we have been working to espouse in the Democratic Leadership
    Council for years and years.
        I believe that we have achieved a victory of new ideas. I come here
    to say more than anything else, however, that when you produce policies
    that embody these values of opportunity and responsibility and community
    in a democratic society--small d--that elects people to Congress and
    that requires the President to work with the Congress, that requires the
    accommodation of various interests all across the country in the private
    sector and requires a partnership with people at the State and local
    level, having the best ideas in the world does not free you of the
    obligation to make difficult decisions.
        I further come here to say that we don't want to be in the position
    that some of our predecessors were in the other party where they were
    willing, from time to time, to exalt political rhetoric over reality and
    where they were willing, from time to time, to let the perfect become
    the enemy of the good.
        Our obligation is to do good things to move this country forward
    that embody our ideas and our philosophies. That does not relieve us of
    the obligation to make the hard decisions. It imposes that obligation on
    us, and that is what we are trying to do.
        As we approach the end of the year it is time to take stock of how
    far we have come, and I want to start, again, by paying my debts to this
    organization. Seven Cabinet members of this administration were DLC
    members--seven.
        My Chief of Staff, Mack McLarty, who came with me today, was an
    early and strong supporter of the DLC. We have Elaine Kamarck who was
    one of yours who did such a brilliant job on our reinventing Government
    program. And Bruce Reed and Bill Galston are the intellectual firepower
    behind what we're doing in welfare reform and crime and family
    preservation. Jeremy Rosner wrote the wonderful words that I was
    privileged to speak at the Middle East peace signing, one of the best
    speeches I have had the opportunity to give as the President. I know it
    was a pretty good subject, but I had a pretty good speech writer, too,
    thanks to his growth, and I think you had a lot to do with that. There
    are so many others, Doug Ross, Jim Blanchard, and others, who are active
    in the DLC, who are now part of our administration.
        I also want to thank those who are here today from my administration
    to talk about national service, welfare reform, and other things,
    including Donna Shalala and Eli Segal and Roger Altman. Let's look at
    what we've done together. And let me begin by again thanking the DLC
    members and the Congress, many of whom are here behind me, and without
    whom none of this would have happened.
        The first thing we did was to move beyond the failed economic
    policies of the past, beyond tax-and-spend and beyond trickle-down. Our
    economic plan is imbued with ideas the DLC has been advocating for
    years. We had the largest deficit reduction plan in history, fueled in
    part by more than 350 specific spending cuts that I have now signed
    entirely into law. And I want to remove some of the veil of rhetoric

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    about that. I'm not talking about smaller increases than were in the
    last Bush budget. I'm talking about 350 accounts in the Federal budget
    where we are spending less money this year than we did last year. Real
    spending cuts.
        We did ask the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share, and
    overwhelmingly, most of them told me as I was campaigning around the
    country, ``I will do that if you'll bring the deficit down and give me
    value for money in what you spend the money on.'' This was not a
    question of class warfare; it was a question of fundamental fairness
    trying to reverse the situation in which the middle class found itself
    for the last 12 years of paying higher taxes on lower income.
        In addition to that, for working families with less than $180,000 a
    year in income, there will be no tax increase. Let me read you from a
    review of the new tax law written by the Kiplinger personal finance
    magazine, hardly an arm of the Democratic Party. I quote from
    Kiplinger--where were these people when I needed them, when we were
    debating this in Congress? I quote, ``About 110 million Americans will
    file individual tax returns next spring. On 108 million of them taxes
    will take a smaller bite than they did this year.'' That's right,
    smaller. The fact is, Kiplinger says, ``More than 98 percent of us are
    not affected by the higher income tax rates which reach back to the
    first of the year. Our tax bills will go down a bit on the same income
    because taxes are indexed for inflation.'' If you are part of the
    forgotten middle class, don't forget that.
        In addition, in this economic plan there are progrowth DLC ideas,
    investment incentives. Small business expensing is dramatically
    increased so that 90 percent of the small businesses in this country,
    because of the increase in the expensing, will pay lower Federal income
    taxes this year than they did last year, 90 percent. There is a venture
    capital gains tax here for small businesses and new businesses where the
    investment is held for 5 years or longer, tax rate cut by 50 percent.
    There are expansions in the resource and development tax credit and
    other things designed specifically to spur high technology growth in
    areas where we need it and where we have great opportunities moving
    toward the 21st century.
        There are pro-work, pro-family welfare reform ideas in this economic
    plan, including the earned-income tax credit, about which I will speak
    more later, I think the most significant pro-work, pro-family economic
    reform we have enacted in 20 years. There are reinventing Government DLC
    ideas in this economic plan, including a major overhaul of the college
    loan program in which we save billions in administrative costs and put
    it into providing lower interest loans to college students who can pay
    them back on easier terms as a percentage of their income. But we
    toughen the collection terms so we make sure they can't beat the bill.
    These things were all in that economic plan, and because of that, what
    really matters is the result.
        And let me say here, a cautionary note, this country is dealing with
    structural economic challenges of 20-year duration. We are dealing with
    social challenges that have been building for 30 years. We are reversing
    economic policies that were in place for 12 years. We will not be able
    to turn this around overnight. The average American has not yet felt a
    significant change in his or her economic circumstances. But look at the
    direction we are going in. We have historically low interest rates.
    Inflation is down to very low levels, 20-year low levels. Investment is
    up. Housing sales last month were at a 14-year high. The unemployment
    rate drop this month was the best drop in 10 years.
        We've had 1.6-plus million new jobs come into this economy since
    January. The private sector jobs since January are about 50 percent
    more, almost 50 percent more than were created by the private sector in
    the previous 4 years. One of the ironies is that under this
    administration for the next 4 years, Government jobs won't grow as much
    as they did in the past 4 years. The private sector jobs will grow more.
        Now we have a long way to go. We still are dealing with stagnant
    incomes. We are still dealing with the fact that more and more people
    who lost their jobs lose them permanently and have to find new and
    different jobs. And that imposes new obligations on us. But we have
    unemployment down, investment up, no inflation, and low interest rates.
    We are moving in the right direction.
        The decision to go after the deficit and to do it in a progressive,
    fair way with new ideas was the right decision. And the rhetoric is now
    being wiped away by the reality. The Kiplinger report will be found now
    by ordinary people when they get their tax forms in April. And a lot of
    the blows that this administration and this party suffered unfairly and
    wrongly in the

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    last year happened because people put out bogus rhetoric that could not
    be overcome by the reality. Now when you see the Kiplinger report and
    the tax forms come out, and people don't pay more taxes, they pay less
    and we've got low inflation, high investment, more jobs, and lower
    unemployment, the truth will out just like it always does.
        Again I will say, all the good ideas in the world does not relieve
    you of the obligation to make the hard decisions and to do it in a way
    that permits us to go forward. That is, somebody has to decide, and we
    have to move, and we have to act, and it all has to count up to a
    majority so you can go forward. That's what democracies do.
        But it won't be enough. This on its own terms will not be enough to
    expand incomes and create jobs sufficient to restore the interest of
    middle class America. Why? Because you have to have a growing economy in
    a global context. With productivity going up, a lot of big companies are
    downsizing. They are going to become more profitable. But what does
    productivity increase mean? It means the same person can produce more,
    right? Sometimes it means fewer people can produce more. We've had
    utterly astonishing growth in productivity in the manufacturing section
    in America, now coming into the service sector and into the Government
    sector, as we use more and more new technology. What does that mean?
    That means fewer people do more work. That means higher unemployment,
    and since you got all these unemployed people out here, it means
    pressure to keep wages down.
        So if you want incomes to go up and jobs to increase, what must you
    do? You must have more customers. There have to be more customers for
    America's goods and services. There is no other way to increase incomes
    and to increase jobs in this country.
        That is why we have pursued another course, long advocated by the
    DLC, trying to broaden the opportunity for Americans to sell their goods
    and services. That is why last summer I met with the G-7 and got those
    countries to agree to expanding market access for manufacturing
    products. That is why I have started trying to build a new and very
    different relationship with Japan. It is simply unsustainable over the
    long run for these two great economies to have the kind of imbalance in
    our economic relationship that we have. That is why I fought so hard
    along with the DLC for the North American Free Trade Agreement. And that
    is why our Trade Ambassador, Mickey Kantor, has hardly slept for the
    last 48 hours as we try to work out an agreement with Europe that's good
    for us and good for them on the GATT rounds, so that we can try to get a
    new worldwide trade agreement by the end of the year.
        I want to say a special word of thanks to all of you who were
    involved in the NAFTA struggle. It was not an easy one. The Speaker of
    the House called it a Lazarus project: It came back from the dead. But I
    particularly appreciate the courageous stance taken by those who had to
    disagree with their friends honestly and openly because none of us could
    figure out how to grow this economy and grow more jobs unless we have
    more customers in an environment in which the global economy is growing.
    That's why I went out to meet with the APEC ministers.
        Someday the whole story of this great struggle will be known, but I
    do want to say I am very grateful to the people in the Congress who did
    the work, and to Mr. McLarty who kept in close touch with the
    President's office in Mexico, and to all the people on my staff and all
    the people who have made this happen, people like my good friend Steny
    Hoyer, who really stuck his neck out on this and took a big risk for it.
        It is a simple, elemental principle that we must grow the global
    economy if a rich country, whether it's America, Japan, or the European
    Community, is going to be able to maintain higher incomes and more jobs.
        Now, the second thing we've got to do is to enable people to succeed
    in this economy. In other words, we have to enable people in America--if
    we have good economic policies and if we can get global economic growth,
    we have to enable more Americans to succeed. It must be possible in our
    country, in other words, to be a successful worker and a successful
    parent, since most workers are parents and most parents have to work.
    That's why I supported and signed the Family and Medical Leave Act,
    something you would support. That's why I fought so hard in the economic
    plan for the earned-income tax credit.
        That phrase is totally Greek to most people. They don't understand
    it. But what it means is that on April 15th between 15 and 16 million
    working families in this country, representing over 40 million American
    citizens who worked

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    this year for incomes of $23,000 a year or less--going up to $26,000 in
    a couple of years--will get an income tax reduction. Why? Because even
    though they work 40 hours a week and they have children in the home,
    they are at, just below, or just hovering above the Federal poverty
    line. This is the most important thing we can do in welfare reform, to
    make a simple statement that if you have kids and you work 40 hours a
    week, you will not be in poverty; we will reward your work. The tax
    system will keep you out of poverty.
        It was a very, very difficult thing to do because it costs money,
    and it complicated the politics of passing the budget. But it was the
    right thing to do because unless we can reward work and family at the
    same time, we are not going to get where we need to go. And it matters.
    We cannot ask the American people to be in the position every year--and
    for many of them, every week and every day--of choosing between being a
    good parent and a good worker. You have to be able to succeed at both in
    the world in which we are living. And I think it was terribly important.
        The next thing I want to say is we've got to train a whole
    generation to think about work in a different way, and we have to
    reorganize our systems. We literally have to reinvent our systems for
    dealing with how people deal with work, the loss of it, and the
    acquisition of new jobs. There are lots of things involved in that, but
    one of them plainly is opening the doors of college education to all
    Americans. I mentioned earlier that we have reformed the student loan
    law. We also passed one of the DLC's most cherished ideas, the national
    service act, into law, thanks to, literally, the parenting work of Eli
    Segal in developing the legislation, getting it through, setting up the
    organization, and maintaining the confidence of large numbers of
    Republicans as well as Democrats in the United States Congress.
        And I know he's going to talk about that in a moment, but 3 years
    from now, 100,000 young people will be able to earn some money for
    further education while rebuilding their communities from the grassroots
    up. This idea has the potential to totally reshape the way Americans
    think about their country and to bring a dramatic change in this country
    on a whole range of social problems from the grassroots up. And Senator
    Nunn and Congressman McCurdy and any number of other people in the DLC
    were out there pounding on this idea for years and years and years. And
    I thank you for that, and I hope you are proud of the fact that it is a
    law of the land.
        The last thing I want to say about what we've tried to do already is
    that we recognized in this organization a long time ago that if people
    didn't feel a certain level of basic security, it was very difficult for
    them to make the changes we need to make. If you want to challenge
    people to seize opportunities and to assume more responsibility, if you
    want people to be able to live with, basically, the chaotic nature of
    the world in which we find ourselves--a very exciting world if you can
    figure out how to win in it--there has to be some sense that the basic
    fabric of society is being maintained, that there is some order, some
    security, some discipline which we need to observe.
        That is why this crime and violence issue is so important: huge
    increases in violent crime in many communities in this country; police
    at an increasingly disadvantageous position--now over three violent
    crimes for every police officer in the country, where it used to be the
    reverse, three police officers for every crime just 30 years ago; and
    all the stories you know about children killing children, or young
    teenagers being better armed than police officers.
        We know there are some things that work. We know--the DLC does,
    we've been advocating this for years--that community policing works.
    Mayor Lanier in Houston just proved it in the ultimate way, by getting
    over 90 percent of the vote. I was trying to think of who else could get
    90 percent of the vote for anything. It tells you how passionately
    people care about this public safety issue.
        We are trying our best in these difficult budget times to get a
    crime bill out that will produce 100,000 new police officers. But they
    must be properly trained and properly deployed. That is a challenge for
    you in the DLC; it is a challenge for us as Americans to make sure not
    only that we pass a bill in Congress that provides the police officers
    but that when they get down to whatever town or city they're in, that
    they are properly trained and properly deployed. Community policing
    works. You can lower crime, not just by catching more criminals but
    because it actually helps to prevent crime from occurring in the first
    place. It really matters.
        There are some other things we ought to do in that crime bill, too,
    and I'll just mention

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    two. We need to provide alternative punishments for youthful offenders
    so that we can use the prison space we have to keep people who shouldn't
    get out for as long as they should stay in. The boot camp proposals are
    in this crime bill, another DLC idea that we have advocated for years
    and years, something that I tried to do at home when I was a Governor.
    And it's an important part of the bill.
        There are two other things in the bill. Senator Kohl, from
    Wisconsin, has put an amendment in to ban the ownership of handguns by
    young people under 18 and to limit access to them to properly controlled
    circumstances by minors. And it passed overwhelmingly.
        Then there was an amendment by Senator Feinstein to ban several
    assault weapons and to specify a number of hunting weapons that cannot
    be restricted at all because they're hunting rifles and they are things
    that people use for sporting purposes. I think it is a good, balanced
    amendment, and I hope it will be in the final provision of the crime
    bill.
        Lastly, let me say that I was elated earlier this week, on Tuesday,
    to sign the Brady bill into law, and I thank the DLC for its
    longstanding support of the Brady bill.
        I also want to say that it is perfectly clear to me that one of the
    biggest problems we face as Democrats is that we know that the
    Government has a role to play in dealing with a lot of these problems.
    But we also know that in America there is a historic distrust of
    Government that is healthy. And in the more recent years that distrust
    has risen to record levels which is not healthy, and we have to do
    something about it. But the only way we can do anything about it is by
    giving people better value for their Government. And I want to really
    say a special word of thanks for the work that David Osborne and Elaine
    Kamarck have done in helping the Vice President on this reinventing
    Government project.
        I want you to know that this is not just a report. The report
    recommends that we do what most companies have been doing for years to
    eliminate unnecessary layers of management and empower front-line
    workers to become more responsive to customers to constantly improve our
    services. We are moving to implement that report. The House voted right
    before they left to implement our recommendation to reduce by 252,000 by
    attrition, not by laying people off, the Federal work force over a 5-
    year period. The Senate voted to pay for the crime bill by doing that.
    But both have agreed that we ought to do it.
        The question now is whether we will be given the tools to do it in a
    humane and responsible way, in a way that is good for the Federal
    employees, good for the Federal work force, good for the taxpayers of
    the country. But it is a very important thing. We can only make this
    Government work if we have the tools to do it. We have, for example,
    clear evidence that the Pentagon can meet a lot more of our national
    security needs if we have procurement reform, that we are still wasting
    billions of dollars in the way we buy things.
        When I was in Alameda the other day on the U.S. carrier Carl Vincent
    having lunch with some career Navy personnel, an enlisted man with 19
    years of service told me that he had just--because he was on a ship he
    had access to emergency procurement, sort of an escape hatch from the
    procurement clause--he said, ``I went down to a computer store and I
    bought a personal computer for this ship for something we needed that
    cost one-half as much and had twice the capacity of the computer
    required to be bought in the procurement regulations of the Federal
    Government.'' That is still going on.
        We have a procurement reform bill pending in the Congress. If we are
    going to do what you want us to do on reinventing Government we have got
    to be given the legal authority to manage this Government with the same
    sort of flexibility and common sense that people in the private sector
    have.
        And you know, I've got my longtime friend and former colleague and
    your former chairman, Chuck Robb, behind me. I mean, he's been preaching
    this stuff for years, and when he was a Governor, he worked on it. And I
    can just tell you that there are things we can do to save billions of
    dollars and still increase investment where we need it, but we have to
    be given the tools to do it.
        So I ask the DLC to urge the Congress to pass the structural reforms
    we need to have the kind of budgeting, procurement, and personnel
    practices that will permit us to save money and increase investment in
    our future at the same time.
        Now, next year we have a lot of challenges ahead of us: health care,
    welfare reform, re-doing the system of education and job training

    [[Page 2100]]

    and unemployment, to mention the three biggest, perhaps. And I would
    like to say just a word about each of them in terms of the ideas of the
    DLC.
        First, we have to provide our workers and businesses the security
    they need to know that they will not be bankrupted by an illness or
    paralyzed by the constant fear of the loss of coverage. Almost nobody in
    America today really knows for sure that they will never lose their
    health care coverage--for sure, no matter what happens to them or what
    happens to their business.
        I want you to know what this budget really looks like, and the only
    reason the deficit is a continuing problem. I wish I had a graph here.
    If I had a graph here and this were zero on spending--this is zero, zero
    increases. Here is where defense is going, down; domestic spending,
    flat. That means every time we put more money into Head Start we have
    cut that much money somewhere else. Interest on the debt is going up
    some because even though interest rates are low, the corpus of the debt
    is getting bigger. Then our revenues are going up like this, about 8
    percent next year, retirement going up because of the cost-of-living
    that everybody gets who is on Social Security or any kind of retirement.
    But the big numbers are Medicare, 11 percent, one year. This is at 3\1/
    2\ percent inflation max, right? One percent growth in the Medicare
    rolls, 2 percent growth in the Medicaid rolls. Medicare going up 11
    percent, Medicaid going up 16 percent. That is it. At a time when the
    most conservative Republicans in the Congress would say we should be
    spending more on new high-technology ventures and in defense conversion
    and in trying to help us adjust from a defense to a domestic economy,
    that's what we're spending our money on.
        And I talked to executive after executive facing the same thing. But
    there is good news. The Federal health insurance program, which is big
    and has bargaining power, has actually had many of its policies lower
    this year than they were last year. The State of California, which is in
    terrible financial shape--so everybody knows they don't have a lot of
    money and which has huge bargaining power--has negotiated a cost
    increase in its premiums less than the rate of inflation.
        So what do we have to do with health care? Again, to avoid the stale
    debate of right and left--one side says, well, the present system is
    just going to cure itself, and another is saying that the Government
    ought to take it over and operate it--what can we do?
        If you go back to what you wrote in ``Mandate for Change''--when
    Jeremy Rosner was back in domestic policy instead of foreign policy--you
    say we should be able to change the rules of the private health care
    market to produce universal coverage and lower cost, better quality
    care. I agree with that.
        We have to offer the American people a new choice, that is,
    guaranteed private insurance. I think there have to be two changes in
    the existing system. First of all, you have to provide health insurance
    that you can never lose, whether you are in or out of work, and no
    matter what kind of job you are in, because a lot of people are going to
    go from big companies that have big benefits to smaller companies in the
    inevitable restructuring of the economy.
        And you have to give greater consumer power, market power, to small
    businesses and to self-employed people. And in order to do it you have
    to go to a broad-based community rating scheme, in my judgment, so that
    there is no disincentive for little companies to hire people who have
    had somebody in their family who has been sick, who has had a
    preexisting condition.
        Now, every other country in the world with which we compete,
    including those that are doing quite well, has figured out how to do
    this. We're the only people who haven't figured out how to do it. I just
    refuse to believe that we can't figure out how to give health care
    security to everybody in this country and to give equal bargaining
    power, market power, in the marketplace to small businesses and self-
    employed people. I just refuse to believe that. I think we can.
        We can disagree about a lot of things, but I think everybody would
    admit we ought to have a system in which there is a good comprehensive
    benefit package, including primary and preventive care that is given to
    every family, and that people have to assume some personal
    responsibility for it and ought to be prepared to pay something for it,
    but that we ought to do that.
        If we don't, you're going to continue to see your Federal Government
    faced with insolvency. We're going to continue to have to cut all of our
    spending from domestic investments, many of which 80 percent of the
    people in this room

    [[Page 2101]]

    think we ought to be making. We're going to continue to see massive cost
    shifting from the Government to the private sector and within the
    private sector from some companies to others, and often the companies
    with the most generous health care benefits are the ones that are the
    most vulnerable in global competition.
        This is a nutty system, and we have to fix it. And we have to fix it
    without messing up what is wonderful about it, the quality of care, the
    availability of emerging technologies. The things that people do today
    in this health care system that are very good--we can fix what's wrong
    without messing that up. And there are a lot of options we can pursue to
    get there, but I would just urge you to stick with what was in the
    ``Mandate for Change.'' Do not give up on universal coverage. And do not
    give up on the proposition that there has to be a competitive capacity
    for all, all employers, including small businesses and the self-
    employed. If you will stay with that, then we can reach an agreement
    next year which will be the most historic domestic achievement for this
    country in a generation. And we have to do that.
        With regard to welfare reform, let me just say very briefly--I want
    to say again how much I appreciate the work that Bruce Reed has done,
    the work that Bill Galston has done. We are moving toward making welfare
    a second chance, not a way of life. We have made this debate an
    interesting one in which there is now a Republican counterproposal. I
    don't agree with all of it, but there are some very good ideas in it. It
    really gives me the cause to believe that we might be able to make a
    bipartisan coalition here with a big majority, to try to give people who
    are trapped in poverty and unemployable in present circumstances a
    chance to be successful parents and successful workers. And I am very,
    very encouraged by that. I think you will be too.
        Finally, just let me say this. We have terrible problems today in
    America because a lot of people who want to work are not employable or
    can't ever get a job where their wages will go up because they don't
    have the skills. Let me just mention two or three things that we are
    trying to do.
        The Secretary of Education, one of the former DLC members, has his
    education reform bill which will pass early when the Congress comes
    back, the Goals 2000 bill, that does what we've been advocating for
    years. It puts the Federal Government--instead of trying to micromanage
    the schools, we're going to provide the schools with the money that the
    teachers and the principals need at the grassroots level to figure out
    how to meet the national education goals. And we will measure schools by
    their results, not by overregulating their influence. And we will give
    them some standards by which they will be able to tell whether they are
    measuring up to global standards or not. And we will focus more on
    trying to give them the tools and the information they need to follow
    strategies that work.
        I'm telling you, every problem in American education has been solved
    by somebody somewhere, including people under the most adverse
    circumstances. What we need to do is to have the Federal Government help
    to spread that instead of getting in the way. And we are changing the
    whole approach to that, thanks to Secretary Riley and the support we
    have received all across the education community, from the NEA, from the
    AFT, from the administrators, from the school boards, from people who
    are really committed to changing the nature of the Federal role in
    public education. There is also in this bill explicit provision for the
    kind of reforms the DLC has advocated in terms of supporting local
    districts who want to have charter schools, who want to have public
    school choice, who want to do the kinds of things that many districts
    have wanted to do where the Federal Government has essentially taken no
    position in the past. That can be a part of this reform.
        The other thing that we are doing is to try to work out with the
    Secretary of Education and the Secretary of Labor a national system of
    apprenticeships to move people from school to work who aren't going to
    4-year colleges. Everybody who doesn't go to a 4-year college and get
    the degree at least needs 2 years of further education and training. And
    our school-to-work program makes a good beginning on that.
        The final thing we're trying to do is to deal with the terrible
    problem of the unemployment system. Today, if you are an employer and
    you pay the unemployment tax, you are paying for a system that is
    dysfunctional. You are basically paying for a lot of workers to draw a
    reduced income until it's obvious that the unemployment runs out and
    they are not being called back to their old jobs. The unemployment
    system was

    [[Page 2102]]

    developed in a time when people were called back to their old jobs.
        What we need to do is to develop an immediate system of reemployment
    so that the minute someone knows they are going to be unemployed, they
    are immediately eligible for retraining, for job placement, for the kind
    of services that will give people the chance to make a quick start back
    in life and to use that unemployment stream to get continuous
    retraining. I hope that we can get the employer community, the labor
    community together in this country to do this. Secretary Reich's most
    important contribution to this entire administration may be changing
    people's understanding of the way the institution we have here has
    nothing to do with the nature of unemployment for most Americans
    anymore. That is our big reinventing Government challenge for next year.
        Now, let me say finally that the reports say that this
    administration had the best year in terms of congressional success of
    any in the last 40 years. You heard Senator Breaux say--and I've called
    Senator Lieberman in the middle of the night enough to know--that the
    Congress worked 40 percent more this year, spent 40 percent more hours
    on the job than last year, 40 percent more. We made a difference. If we
    can do health care, welfare reform and reform the education and training
    system next year, we'll make more of a difference. If we can keep
    growing this economy with stable, secure policies, it will begin to be
    felt in the lives of middle class Americans.
        But I will end where I began. The Democratic Party has got to be a
    grassroots party. It has got to reflect not only the economic interests
    but the basic values of most American people. And there are a lot of
    things that we have to do in this country that deal with crime and
    violence and restoring the family and restoring communities that cannot
    be done, not now, not ever, by the President and the Congress alone that
    require private sector initiatives, that require people at the State and
    local level to act.
        The most important thing we ever said in the DLC was that in the end
    there can be no successful opportunity without responsibility, and you
    can't run a country unless everybody recognizes that we are in a
    community in which we have responsibilities to one another and in which
    we go up or down together. That was the most important thing we ever
    said.
        So I ask you as you leave here, I hope you will go home and talk
    about how the ideas that you have fought for are being brought to life
    in this administration. But more important than that, I hope you will go
    home and remember that no matter who the President of the United States
    is, until the American people are prepared to take responsibility for
    their futures and until we are prepared to recognize again not just in
    our rhetoric but in our lives that this is one country and we have got
    to find a way to make a strength out of our diversity, we have got to
    stop wasting so many kids, we have got to stop permitting the incredible
    level of social disintegration that we have permitted, we will never
    become what we ought to.
        And when we become the party that is the grassroots, bottom-up,
    personal responsibility, community-oriented party committed not only to
    saying to the President and the Congress, ``This is what we want you to
    do for America,'' but to proclaiming every day, ``Here is what we are
    doing for America,'' we will not be where we all set out to go. I think
    we're well on the way.
        Thank you very much, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:31 a.m. at the Sheraton Washington
    Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to George Bruno, DLC New Hampshire
    State chapter organizer, and David Osborne, consultant with the National
    Performance Review.