[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[June 22, 1994]
[Pages 1120-1124]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the Democratic National Committee Dinner
June 22, 1994

    Thank you very much. Chairman Wilhelm, my good friend Vernon Jordan, 
between the two of you there's nothing left for me to say. [Laughter] I 
thank you for your leadership of our party. I congratulate you and DeGee 
on the upcoming birth of your first child. I thank Vernon and Ann Jordan 
and all those others who worked on this dinner and made it so successful 
tonight. I want to thank Terry McAuliffe and all the cochairs of this 
dinner, the Members of the Congress, the members of the Cabinet, members 
of the administration who are here, and my fellow Americans.
    I have two pieces of good news tonight. The first is that with about 
a half an hour left to go, the United States is ahead in the World Cup, 
2 to nothing, over Colombia. I kind of like this World Cup. It reminds 
me of my campaign. We're the underdog in this deal; I like it. 
[Laughter] The second is far more important, and perhaps most of you 
have already heard, but this afternoon, the United States received 
official confirmation that North Korea is prepared to freeze its nuclear 
program in return for talking to us about those issues. This event, of 
course, is important to all of us, to our children, and if we're 
successful, even to our children's children. It does not solve our 
problems, but it gives us a chance to begin to solve them. It came about 
because of the steadfastness and resolve of our administration and 
working with our allies. In this case, we had an interesting set of 
allies from the very beginning, of course our friends in South Korea and 
Japan, but also in Russia and China. There was a sense that we had to do 
something here.
    It came about because of the deft putting of our case and the case 
for North Korea's coming into the community of nations by another great 
Democrat, former President Jimmy Carter. And tonight, I mentioned it not 
only because it is so important to all of us and to our future but 
because in addition to this being a party gala, it is an American 
celebration.
    When I heard on the way in the themes of the little film you saw on 
our administration, I thought to myself that most of those things we 
have done benefit people without regard to their party and that 
Democrats in 1992 promised a new direction for our country, one rooted 
in the real problems and the real promise of this Nation. I had some 
fairly basic ideas. I thought that we could not be strong abroad unless 
we were strong at home, that we could never be strong at home if we 
tried to withdraw from the world, but that we had to rebuild ourselves 
from the grassroots, based on the real conditions in our country.
    I'll never forget when David Wilhelm suggested that we get on that 
bus. It was easy for him to say; he didn't have to ride on it as long as 
we did. [Laughter] But I think Hillary and Al and Tipper would admit 
that that bus and those trips not only became the symbol of our campaign 
but kept us firmly rooted to the American people. We saw individually 
the people that had been beaten down and had often given up on their 
National Government, Maybe collectively they were cynical and be-


[[Page 1121]]

lieved gridlock was inevitable, but individually, they were full of hope 
and concern. They wanted so much for the promise of America to be alive 
for their children, and they knew that some tough things would have to 
be done.
    There's no way that TV ads could convey what we saw in the eyes of a 
woman on the side of the road in the Middle West one night who told us 
that her husband and she had been married for 35 years and he had been 
having increasing difficulty holding on to jobs because of the decline 
of the economy. And finally, he had taken a job paying just over $5 an 
hour, and they had lost their health insurance, and she was ill. And she 
did not know what to do, but she was absolutely sure that they had 
worked hard and played by the rules.
    There's no way a poll or a commercial could recapture the face of 
the woman I saw in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one day at a Quaker Oats plant, 
holding a child of another race while we were being demonstrated against 
by people who disagreed with my pro-choice position. This woman had a 
pro-choice sticker on, and she had a baby in her arms of another race. 
And I said, ``Where did you get that baby?'' And she said, ``This is my 
baby.'' And I said, ``Well, where did you get this baby?'' She said, ``I 
got this baby from Florida, and she has AIDS. But somebody's got to take 
care of all these babies with AIDS.'' This woman had been divorced, was 
living in an apartment with her own two children, struggling to make 
ends meet, and she had adopted another child. She said, ``I'm for you, 
and I wish you'd tell those people back there with their signs if they 
feel so strongly about it, come help me adopt these babies and stand up 
for their right to grow up and live a good life.''
    I met a sheriff in east Texas who's got to be the only east Texas 
sheriff in America that subscribed to Rolling Stone--[laughter]--who 
told me he wanted me to pass a real tough crime bill, but not to forget 
that the kids needed something to say yes to as well.
    I wish I could just tell you all these stories. But when I showed up 
here, I knew that, as my Granddaddy used to say, ``There would be a lot 
of slips between the cup and the lip,'' but if I could just keep 
remembering all those people, in the end it would come out all right.
    And what we have tried to do is exactly what I said I would try to 
in the campaign. We've tried to restore the economy, to restore the link 
between the people and the Government, to make it work for ordinary 
people again, to rebuild a sense of work and family and community and 
empowerment of individual citizens, and to move this country into the 
21st century still the greatest country in the world with the most hopes 
for our children.
    If you look at what has happened in the last 18 months, I think you 
can make a pretty compelling case that we're doing the right things. Our 
economy is growing steadily: over 3.4 million new jobs in 16 months, 
more than in the previous 4 years combined; a point-and-a-half-plus drop 
in the unemployment rate; in 1993, more new business incorporations than 
in any year since World War II; the first quarter of this year, the 
first quarter in over 15 years when there was not a bank failure.
    Our Republican friends always talk about how they deplored the 
deficit and they deplored Government spending. But it just kept getting 
bigger when they were in office. And they blamed the Congress. But when 
you look at the facts, the truth is that, in spite of the exploding 
deficits, Congress actually appropriated slightly less money in the 
previous 12 years than the administrations asked for. [Applause] And all 
that about--there's the Congressmen clapping out there, tell you the 
truth. [Laughter] But they were very skilled at saying one thing and 
doing another. And I'm not very good at that, and it embarrasses me, so 
we decided we'd actually try to bring the deficit down.
    Last year, by the narrowest of margins, because we got no help and a 
lot of hot rhetoric, our economic plan passed. And it began a system of 
disciplined budgeting, which will be accompanied by this year's budget, 
the first time in 17 years two President's budgets have been adopted on 
time by the United States Congress. That will give us 3 years of deficit 
reduction for the first time since Harry Truman was the President of the 
United States of America.
    And I want you to know, working with this Congress, this budget, the 
Congress will eliminate over 100 Government programs outright, will cut 
200 more, will not only be reducing defense but will reduce domestic 
discretionary spending for the first time since 1969, in 25 years. And 
still we will spend more money on Head Start, more money on Women, 
Infant and Children, more money on school-to-work opportunities, more 
money on education and new technologies for the future. We will invest 
more in people and still cut Government spending,

[[Page 1122]]

because we hired on to get things done not to just talk about them, and 
that is what the Democrats are doing in this town today.
    When you put that with the initiatives in trade that this 
administration has taken--more in 18 months than had been done in a 
generation--we have the basis for the first growth in America in 30 
years that is led by investment and that has no inflation, in 30 years. 
That is what I asked for a chance to work on and what you helped to give 
me. And no amount of rhetoric to the contrary can take away those facts.
    The second thing I said I would try to do is to make Government work 
for ordinary people. And I think we've made a pretty good stab at that. 
With the support of the public employee unions, we have passed budgets 
which will reduce the size of the National Government by a quarter of a 
million by attrition over 5 years and leave us at the end of a 5-year 
period with the smallest Federal work force since John Kennedy was the 
President of the United States. And the money will be used to pay for 
the crime bill to make our streets safer. That is a matter of record.
    We've also begun to make the Government work again. Terry McAuliffe 
told me yesterday that a reporter for a newspaper that is not exactly a 
house organ of the Democratic Party called him and said, ``How did you 
get all these business people to contribute to the Democratic Party?'' 
He said, ``Well, the President's got a good pro-business position.'' And 
the reporter starting laughing. One of the real problems here, you know, 
you're always in the most trouble when you think you have nothing to 
learn. [Laughter]
    The Small Business Administration, under the leadership of Erskine 
Bowles, will now let you apply for a loan on a one-page form, something 
small business people have been begging for for years. The Emergency 
Management Agency, which was the source of ridicule and anger and 
frustration and revulsion for years because it was dominated by 
political appointees, now has a Director from my home State who did it 
for a living. And he's the most popular Federal bureaucrat in the United 
States because FEMA has been there in earthquakes and fires and 
tornadoes, when people needed it. Nobody worries about whether the 
Federal Government is going to be there to do its job anymore. Rice 
farmers in northern California, a few weeks ago, for the first time 
ever, shipped their rice out of ports in northern California to sell in 
Japan, because the Government is working for ordinary people again.
    I don't know how many business people I've had come up to me in the 
last year and say, ``You know, I'm a Republican, but you have the only 
administration where the Commerce Department and the State Department 
work together to try to help me do business overseas, and I appreciate 
that.''
    I wanted to break gridlock. For 7 years, the world trade agreement 
was tied up. It was ratified last year by the nations, and we're going 
to implement it this year. For 7 years, 7 years, even after the attempt 
on President Reagan's life, with his fine Press Secretary, Jim Brady, 
surviving by a miracle and campaigning like crazy for the Brady bill, 
for 7 years the NRA and others tied it up in Congress. But we passed it 
last year. For 7 years, even though it had some bipartisan support, the 
Family and Medical Leave Act could not pass the Congress, but we passed 
it last year. No Presidential vetoes--support for families in the 
workplace. For 6 years now, politics has kept the crime bill from 
passing, but we are on the verge of passing the most important piece of 
anticrime legislation in the history of the United States, more 
punishment but more prevention, more police. And the ban on assault 
weapons, which lost just 2 years ago by 70 votes in the House of 
Representatives, passed. We have brought an end to the gridlock in this 
country, and we should not let it go back the other way at election 
time.
    Now we're working on health care. First, the other side said there 
was no crisis; then there was a crisis but we needed a bipartisan 
solution. I said, ``Fine, here's my plan. You tell me how we are going 
to change it, but we've got to cover everybody.'' Then they started 
running ads saying I was trying to give health care to the Government, 
which wasn't true. But I went out and listened to people, and I said, 
well, maybe it is too bureaucratic. So we changed it some more and took 
out some of the mandatory provisions and made it more flexible to try to 
make it more responsive. And then a Republican Congressman from Iowa 
named Fred Grandy stood up and told the awful truth, that he and his 
colleagues had been given marching orders to do nothing to cooperate to 
try to solve the health care problems in this country.

[[Page 1123]]

    The Governor of Florida was in here today, talking about how he had 
a bill in Florida that was not mandatory but would make the situation 
better, that had the support of every organization in his State. And it 
still died in the senate of the State of Florida because there's a 20-20 
split between Republicans and Democrats. And with all the interest 
groups saying, please do something about health care, every last 
Republican senator still voted against it so they couldn't say he did 
anything on health care.
    Now, in the Senate Finance Committee, there are a couple of 
Republicans who have worked on health care for years, who are trying to 
come together and reach some accommodation. And I can tell you they are 
under withering pressure. But folks, those people who say, ``Let's just 
cover 90 percent and forget about it,'' it won't work. It won't work. 
Three million working Americans have lost their health insurance in the 
last 3 years. We are going backwards. We are the only country in the 
world with an advanced economy that has not figured out how to cover 
everybody.
    Read the article in the Washington Post today about the German 
health care system. The German health care system today takes up a 
smaller percentage of the income of Germany than it did 2 years ago. 
It's about 8.5 percent. Our health care system costs us 14.5 percent of 
our income, and we still can't figure out how to cover--we're not even 
at 85 percent anymore.
    And all the solutions that say, ``Well, let's just not make any 
tough decisions, go up to 90 percent,'' cost you a double ton of money 
in taxes, subsidize the poor, most of whom already can at least get 
Medicare, and not do one single solitary thing for the working middle 
class, 80 percent of whom are those who don't have insurance and who are 
terribly insecure. I'm telling you, we have got to face this problem and 
face it now. Harry Truman tried to get us to do it 50 years ago, and we 
didn't do it, and we've been paying for it ever since.
    Let me say that any time you quote Harry Truman now, the Republicans 
stand up and clap, and everybody says, ``Gosh, I wish we had him around; 
it's too bad we don't have anybody like Truman anymore.'' Let me tell 
you something, folks, I came from one of those families that was for him 
when he was living. [Laughter] And a lot of the people that brag on him 
today wouldn't have walked across the street to shake his hand when he 
was in office because he stood up for ordinary people and he told 
extraordinary truths and he tried to get us to face the problems of our 
time. Now, in retrospect, we can see that he did a good job.
    Every midterm election in the 20th century except one, when 
President Roosevelt could not pass Social Security in 1934, every other 
one has seen a loss in both Houses, or at least one House, for the 
President in power, his party. Why? Because there is always a 
disappointment from the bright promise of the Inauguration to the hard 
reality of governing. Governor Cuomo used to say, ``We campaign in 
poetry, and we govern in prose.'' [Laughter]
    But there is a special problem this year. What is it? It is that 
there is so much accumulated cynicism in this country and people are 
always told about the process, the conflict, the ups, the downs, the 
differences, that a lot of people don't even know what I have just told 
you. And our adversaries are banking on two things. Number one, they 
believe the cynicism of the electorate will (a) cause them to say, ``I 
don't believe it,'' if they hear what we have done and (b) cause them to 
blame those of us who are in if we fail to change because they bring 
back gridlock. And so they think they can be rewarded if they stop 
anything from happening.
    And the second thing that they hope is that they can divert the 
attention of a significant number of our voters from the crying issues 
that unite us as a people by trying to launch another cultural war. And 
this is not just my opinion. There's a new book out by David Frum, a 
conservative and former editorial writer of the Wall Street Journal, 
that you can find adapted in Harper's this week. He says that 
conservatives failed to control the size and cost of the Government and 
they've basically given that up. That's true; we've done a better job of 
that than they did. So instead, he predicts politics in the future will 
become a lot nastier and that the only way to mobilize and excite voters 
will be to trade on our differences on moral and ethnic and racial 
issues.
    I can tell you, folks, we have not survived over 200 years as the 
strongest and oldest democracy in this country by fighting out our 
differences on moral and racial and ethnic issues. And we did not get 
where we are by becoming mired in the luxury, and I use the word 
clearly, the luxury of cynicism.
    You know, the biggest honor I think I've had as your President was 
going to represent us at

[[Page 1124]]

the D-Day ceremonies. It was one of the most extraordinary events of 
Hillary's and my life, going first to Italy and seeing what our soldiers 
endured there, being shelled and killed on those beaches week after 
week, not able to get off; going to England and seeing the 3,800 graves 
of people who fought in the air war for 2 years before the D-Day 
invasion and the list of 5,000 names of people who never came back, 
including Joe Kennedy, Jr., and the great American band leader, Glenn 
Miller; and then going to the beaches at Normandy. And the thing that 
struck me overwhelmingly was that these people who saved the world, who 
laid their lives on the line, they didn't have an option. They knew what 
was at stake. And it makes a mockery of their sacrifice for us to be 
cynical about fulfilling our own legacy.
    This whole atmosphere that permeates this town now--nothing makes 
any difference, and it's all who's up and down and in and out and all 
that, this obsession with process and conflict over product--it makes a 
mockery of what has gotten us here for 200 years.
    I'm going to tell you something: Most of the people I've known in 
politics for 20 years, both parties, have been honest. Most of them have 
worked hard. Most of them have done what they thought was right. Most of 
the time we fought over things that were honest differences, worth 
arguing and fighting over. And we're about to get ourselves in a fix on 
the dawn of the 21st century. We've got the strongest economy in the 
world. We are the envy of the world. Our diversity is a source of great 
strength and the great, great mother lode of wealth for us in the 21st 
century in the global economy, if we've got sense enough to rescue these 
kids out of these cities, whose lives are being squandered. And the only 
thing that can mess it up for us is if we permitted ourselves to have 
the wrong fights, to believe that we were immoral because we had 
differences over certain issues, and if we permitted ourselves to become 
so cynical that we wouldn't even listen to the truth.
    And I am here tonight to tell you that what you need to do is to go 
out of this room tonight and not just be glad that you gave money to 
this party and to our administration and to our continued efforts but to 
think of your words as a knife that can cut through stone. And every 
time you hear one of your fellow Americans say some cynical and 
nonsensical thing implying that we're all up here just trying to feather 
our nest and it doesn't make any difference what's done and everything's 
in trouble, you tell them the truth, not to benefit me and the Democrats 
in Congress--although, to be sure, we'll be benefited for it because we 
have broken gridlock and we are moving forward--but to give Americans 
their citizenship back. We did not get here by being cynics, we got here 
by being believers.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 9:09 p.m. at the Washington Hilton Hotel. 
In his remarks, he referred to David Wilhelm, chairman, Democratic 
National Committee, and his wife, DeGee; dinner chairman Vernon Jordan, 
and his wife, Ann; and DNC finance chairman Terry McAuliffe.