[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.