[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[June 24, 1994]
[Pages 1138-1143]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 1138]]


Remarks at a Fundraiser for Representative Richard Gephardt in St. Louis
June 24, 1994

    Thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for that 
wonderful welcome. It's great to be back in St. Louis. Thank you, August 
Busch, for those kind words and for what you have done to support the 
work of our administration and the people of Missouri. I am delighted to 
be here with all of you.
    I want to say a special word of thanks to Mr. Busch for two things: 
first of all, for stepping forward last year when it would have been 
easy to hang back and helping us to build a coalition of business 
leaders from both parties all across the country for the economic plan 
that Congress passed to bring the deficit down and get this economy 
going again; and for the work he did that Congressman Gephardt 
mentioned, during the great flood last year to help the Red Cross and 
the Salvation Army to send drinking water to families all across the 
region. That's the kind of thing that we depend on our great companies 
to do, but it's something we should never take for granted but, instead, 
should appreciate.
    I see Congressman Costello and Congressman Volkmer here. We were 
with Congressman Clay earlier today. He may be here, and Congressman 
Poshard. I know that Mayor Bosley is here and your county executive, 
Buzz Westfall. And I was with your Lieutenant Governor, Roger Wilson, 
and your treasurer, Bob Holden, earlier today. I don't know, I'm sure 
there are many other dignitaries here. But let me say that I always love 
coming to Missouri. You were good to me in the campaign of 1992. I've 
been back here often, and I always feel at home.
    This afternoon, Dick Gephardt and I were in the Fox Park 
neighborhood with people in that community who, along with the mayor, 
the chief of police, and others, are trying to take control of their 
destiny and fight against crime. We heard things that were 
heartbreaking, but we saw things that were uplifting. We talked about a 
drug-related killing of a 12-year-old boy, the 23d child in the city 
killed this year. We heard about a 19-year-old young man who was gunned 
down with an AK-47 assault weapon, one of the kinds that Congressman 
Gephardt and I are trying to ban in this crime bill.
    But we were on the platform with a young fellow that really is an 
American hero to me, a young man named Tim Hager who was severely beaten 
in that neighborhood by thieves when he was a teenager. He had to have 
pins inserted in his hips. But he never gave up his dream to join the 
Marines. And he joined and survived basic training, which is something 
in itself. And when he completed basic training, he was told after an 
examination that his hips had deteriorated to the point that he had an 
arthritic condition and he would have to be mustered out.
    So he had to give up this lifetime dream because as a child he was 
victimized by criminals and by violence. Within one week after leaving 
the Marines, however, he had joined the community service effort in this 
community and in his neighborhood. And now he's part of an effort 
involving almost 8,000 other young people in what we call our Summer of 
Safety, a national service project growing out of a program that all the 
Congressmen here present helped me pass last year to give our young 
people a sense of mission to help rebuild our country at the grassroots 
level. He's organizing block patrols, turning parks into oases for 
families and kids instead of places of dangers, escorting senior 
citizens, working with the police to diminish crime. And I told that 
young man today, he's doing a lot for our national security right here 
at home by helping to make us all safer, and I think you should be proud 
that your city has people like that.
    This fall, those 8,000 young people will be replaced by 20,000 more 
when we launch our national service program, AmeriCorps, fully. The head 
of our national service program, Eli Segal, is here with me tonight. 
He's done a brilliant job of creating this program from an idea I had 
and talked about in the campaign, that we ought to have a domestic Peace 
Corps. If the Congress will give us the funding, within 2 years we'll 
have 100,000 young Americans working every year, earning money for a 
college education or for job training programs, solving the problems of 
America at the grassroots level, giving power and purpose back to the 
lives of people to make them safer and to make them fuller.

[[Page 1139]]

It represents in some ways the very best of all the reasons I ran for 
President. I wanted to restore this economy, to make Government work for 
ordinary people again, to empower individuals and strengthen 
communities. National service represents all that.
    You know, a lot of us in my generation were inspired by the Peace 
Corps. At its height, the Peace Corps had 16,000 people a year. We're 
going to start with 20,000. If we can get it funded, we'll be at 100,000 
the year after next. And I am absolutely confident if the money is there 
we could have a quarter of a million young Americans every year within 5 
years, from now on, forever, working to deal with our problems and build 
our country. That is what I think we ought to be about in this country.
    Now, I wanted to start with this story to make this point. This is a 
very great country. And most people get up every day and go to work and 
try to make something of themselves, help their families, do something 
to help move forward. And the job of Government is not to give the 
American people a handout but to give the American people a hand up, to 
face the challenges of this time, and to forge partnerships that unleash 
the enormous character and energy and drive of the America people. And 
that is, more than anything else, what I believe Dick Gephardt has 
devoted his life to.
    I have been in this business now for a good while. I was a Governor 
for a dozen years, and before that I was an attorney general. And the 
longer I stay in it, the more I tend to view people not just in terms of 
their partisan affiliation or even the way they are characterized as 
liberal or conservative, because that's about words and labels, but 
about what is really in their hearts and what they do every day.
    And an awful lot of people today who are being basically barraged, I 
think, in this country by words and words and words and words and the 
rhetoric of combat and positioning. And too often, it seems to me, we 
wind up evaluating people based on not what they do and what they're 
really going to stand for but what labels are thrown around.
    And it kind of reminds me of a sign that became the source of a 
great story we used to tell on the stump in Arkansas. On a country road 
there was a guy that had his business sign up. It said, ``George Jones, 
Veterinarian/ Taxidermist.'' And then under it, it said, ``Either way, 
you get your dog back.'' [Laughter]
    Well, if we ever get to the point, my fellow Americans, when 
politics in this country is just about words and name-calling, that's 
what it will amount to. And don't you forget it. It does matter what 
condition you get your dog back in. And as I told a smaller group of his 
supporters before I came out here, I appreciate Dick Gephardt for a lot 
of things, one is because he's a great leader in the House. And if it 
weren't for him, we'd have never passed that economic program last year. 
And there are a lot of other things that would not have happened. I 
respect him because he's a great leader for St. Louis and for his 
congressional district as I saw as we worked through the problems of the 
flood last year. He's proved as well as anybody I know that you can be a 
national leader without giving up your local commitments and your 
grassroots contacts and your commitment to the specific interests of 
your district.
    But the most important thing about him is that he believes that he's 
supposed to get up every day and do something. And you may think that's 
funny, but that's real important in this day and age, in this day and 
age when we're deluged with information and words fly back and forth and 
cynicism is so much the order of the day, the idea that a person in a 
position of national leadership really gets up with a vision of what 
America ought to be like and a clear path there. And it's made for a 
wonderful relationship.
    Even on the couple of occasions where he and I have had a 
disagreement, I didn't give it a second thought because I knew it came 
out of his conviction that he had thought through the issue, and that he 
really believed he was right, and that he was determined to do something 
to move our country forward. And if everybody in public life could do 
that and we could somehow communicate that through the haze of cynicism 
and hard rhetoric that seems so much in evidence today, this country 
would be much further ahead. He is a national treasure, and I'm glad 
you're here to keep him in office tonight.
    You know, I'll just give one example. You may never even read about 
this, but it's the kind of thing that I think is important. Dick is 
leading cosponsor of our reemployment act. Now, since nobody's dropping 
bombs on me for proposing it, and there's no controversy, conflict, or 
scandal, you will probably never hear about it. [Laughter]

[[Page 1140]]

    But let me tell you, it is a big deal. Why is it a big deal? Number 
one, the average 18-year-old is going to change jobs eight times in a 
lifetime, even if that person, he or she, stays with the same employer. 
Number two, when a person loses a job today, unlike in previous decades, 
they typically are not called back to that job. A lot of big companies 
are downsizing permanently, which means that the unemployment system is 
out of position with the modern economy. Why? Because those of you who 
are employers have been paying that unemployment tax for years on the 
theory that when someone got unemployed, it was because the economy had 
temporarily turned down, and then a person could draw the unemployment 
check and make obviously less than they made when they were working but 
still enough to live on until the economy came back up and the person 
was called back to work.
    And of course, there were always some people that lost their jobs 
permanently, and they could go around and find the training programs and 
then eventually they'd get another job. But, if most people are not 
being called back to their old job, it obviously is a terrific waste of 
money and human potential for those of you who pay into the unemployment 
fund to keep paying people to draw a lower check to do nothing, to wait 
until the unemployment runs out to find out that they still have to find 
another job.
    So what we want to do is to change the unemployment system into a 
reemployment system so the minute anybody is laid off, they have the 
option right then to start a training program, to look about whether 
they want to start their own business, to go to one place and find out 
where all the possible opportunities for them are, not to have to go 
through some bureaucratic maze.
    Again, you might not ever hear about it if you hadn't come up here 
tonight, but this could make a huge difference in the long-term 
productivity and security of the American middle class. And it could 
also make a big difference for those of you who pay the unemployment 
taxes, because it could cut the amount of time people are unemployed and 
it would increase America's economic growth if we shortened periods of 
idleness by empowering workers more quickly to learn new skills and take 
new jobs.
    Now, that's the kind of thing a real public servant does, thinking 
not of today's headlines but of tomorrow's future for our children. And 
that is why I wanted to be here tonight. I have seen so many times Dick 
Gephardt--not in public when people were looking and listening, but in 
private conversation--bring the talk back to the urgent obligation 
public servants have to deal with, the real problems of real people. And 
if all of you could see him as I have seen him in private doing his 
business, you would be even prouder of him than what you have seen in 
public. Would that we could say that of all of us. That is a very 
important thing.
    When I took office, Government had become more and more about talk 
and less and less about action. Everybody talked about the deficit while 
it got bigger. We never could talk it down, you know. And finally, it 
had gotten so big, the things we had to do about it were not popular. 
And ironically, the deficit had gotten bigger while middle class taxes 
had gone up and investments in our future in education and training and 
new technologies had gone down. Nobody could quite figure out how it had 
happened.
    Well, with Dick Gephardt's help, we made some tough decisions. We 
cut a lot of spending programs. We raised taxes on the wealthiest 
Americans, including a lot of you here tonight that are still supporting 
it, which I appreciate. But all your money went to finance a reduction 
in the deficit, every red cent of it.
    We gave a break to one in six Americans who have children, who work 
40 hours a week and are hovering above the poverty line, because we 
didn't want those people to be taxed into poverty and to quit working 
and to go on welfare. We wanted them to stay in the work force and be 
able to raise their children in dignity. And we didn't think people who 
were working 40 hours a week should be taxed into poverty.
    And we brought the deficit down. This year, without a tax increase, 
we eliminated over 100 other programs in this deficit reduction package, 
cut 200 others. I presented a budget to the Congress that reduces 
domestic discretionary spending for the first time in 25 years. And when 
the budget goes through this year, it will guarantee 3 years of 
reduction in the Federal deficit for the first time since Harry Truman 
of Missouri was President of the United States of America.
    And a lot of our opponents are out there running television ads 
saying, ``Oh, they passed the biggest tax increase in history.'' By any 
rational calculation, that was not true. It was the biggest deficit 
reduction package in history. Only

[[Page 1141]]

1.2 percent of Americans had their tax rates increased; 16 percent got a 
tax cut because they were in the income category I meant. And now in 
November we will see a contest between all the rhetoric about what was 
happening and the fact that, after the other crowd had it for 12 years, 
you simply couldn't talk the deficit down any more. You actually had to 
do something to get it down. And the fact that you're here tells me that 
you know that and you respect Dick Gephardt for having the courage and 
the vision to take care of our children and our children's children and 
let somebody else throw the words around. And that's what we need more 
of.
    But the good news is it actually worked the way it was supposed to. 
There was a big drop in interest rates; millions of people refinanced 
their homes; the car industry started exploding. It helped St. Louis a 
lot. After 4 years in which you lost 2,000, jobs in one year you gained 
28,000 jobs in the St. Louis area alone; 3.5 million new jobs in this 
country in a year and a half, far more than in the previous 4 years, 
because action was substituted for talk. It almost always works. It 
works in your personal life, too, doesn't it? It's just hard to talk 
things away. You always have to change what you're doing.
    We did a lot of other things, too. We really tried to break 
gridlock. People talked about doing something about the fact that 
anybody with a criminal record could buy a gun easily in this country. 
And the Brady bill hovered around in Washington for 7 years, with all 
the former Presidents of both parties for it and we couldn't seem to 
pass it. But after 7 years of gridlock, it finally passed.
    After 7 years of gridlock, we finally passed the family and medical 
leave law. It's really important because it says most parents have to 
work but the most important work of any society is parenting. So it 
ought to be possible to take a little time off when you've got a sick 
child or an ailing parent or when a baby is being born without losing 
your job, because we live in a country now where we all have to be good 
workers and good parents. And if we sacrifice one role for the other, we 
will never become what we ought to be. It took 7 years to get that 
passed, but we broke gridlock with Dick Gephardt's leadership and passed 
the family leave law and made our country a stronger country.
    Now we're working on a lot of exciting other things. We're working 
on passing a crime bill we talked about today, a crime bill that will 
put 100,000 more police officers on the street; a crime bill that will 
stiffen punishment but will also increase programs for prevention to 
help young people stay out of trouble, everything from summer jobs to 
midnight basketball to after-school programs for latchkey children; that 
will ban the kind of assault weapons that make gangs better armed than 
police. It is a very important piece of legislation. It's been held up 
in Congress for over 5 years, nearly 6 years, by political gridlock. 
We're going to break that gridlock next month and give the American 
people a bill that will make St. Louis a safer place to live, thanks to 
Dick Gephardt's leadership.
    We're working on political reform, on lobby reform, campaign finance 
reform. We have a lot of major environmental legislation moving through 
the Congress with unprecedented support from environmental groups and 
business groups working together. We're working on opening trade all 
around the world with a worldwide trade agreement that Congressman 
Gephardt endorsed just the other day that will add hundreds of thousands 
of American jobs between now and the end of this decade to our economy. 
And we are working to try to redeem a pledge and a commitment that Harry 
Truman made 50 years ago, finally to provide assurance of health care to 
all working families in this country, something we should have done when 
he was President of the United States of America.
    I want to talk just a moment about this health care issue because it 
is just like the deficit; you just can't talk it down. And it is a 
difficult issue; it is not free of difficulty. But here are the facts: 
Of all the advanced countries in the world, only the United States does 
not provide health coverage to everybody--``everybody'' defined as 98 
percent of us or more. Everybody else has done that. In our country, we 
cover about 83 percent of our people with health insurance or through a 
Government program like Medicare for the senior citizens.
    No other country in the world spends more than 10 percent of their 
income on health care. In our country, we spend 14 percent--40 percent 
more of our income than anybody else--but we can't figure out how to 
cover everybody. Not only that, the burden of paying for health

[[Page 1142]]

care is wildly uneven and unfair. The Government does not fully 
reimburse doctors and clinics and hospitals for health care for the poor 
and often for health care for senior citizens. Many others aren't 
insured at all and can't pay, but they get care. And all that cost is 
then shoved on to companies that do provide for their employees. So big 
companies like McDonnell-Douglas pay health care not only for their own 
employees but pay for the extra cost of those that take no care for 
themselves and make no investment.
    Small businesses in this country who are struggling to provide some 
health insurance for their employees pay rates that are, on average, 35 
to 40 percent higher than bigger business or Government does. So they're 
in the worst of all worlds.
    I was in Columbus, Ohio, the other day, and I met a woman who--she 
and her husband ran a delicatessen where I had lunch. They had 20 full-
time employees and 20 part-time employees. And she had had cancer 5 
years before. And she said, ``I am a living example of what is unfair 
about this system.'' She said, ``We provide health insurance for our 20 
full-time employees. And because I had cancer 5 years ago, we pay higher 
rates for our whole group. But I pay for them. And I resent the fact 
that my competitors don't do it. On the other hand, I've got 20 part-
time employees that I can't afford to cover, and I feel guilty that I 
don't do that. I've got it coming and going. But I simply can't afford 
it. If everybody had to do it, I wouldn't be at a competitive 
disadvantage. The cost would actually be less than I'm paying now for me 
to cover my part-time employees if I could be in a big pool so that I 
could buy insurance on the same competitive basis larger companies do. 
Won't you please do something so I can do that?''
    On the other hand, in America--let's take it the other way--we have 
a lot of people who are small business people who operate on very narrow 
profit margins. They're creating most of the jobs in this country, and 
they don't think they can afford anything else for health care. So what 
are we going to do? What we've done for 40 years is nothing, except just 
to sort of add on one little program after another.
    In 3 years, in 3 years, because of the rising cost of health care, 
we've lost 3 million people out of the health insurance system. Three 
million more people uncovered. In 1980, 87.5 percent of the American 
people were covered with health insurance. By 1993, only 83 percent of 
the American people were. We are going in reverse, and we're spending 
more while fewer are covered.
    Now, when I put out my program I went around and I listened to 
people talk about it. And they said, ``Ah, you've got too many rules in 
there; it's too bureaucratic; you need to make it more flexible; change 
it some.'' And I said, fine. The only thing I want to do is find a way 
to cover everybody and give small business, farmers, and self-employed 
people a break so they can buy rates--insurance on a competitive basis 
and we can have some way of holding costs down without sacrificing 
quality. That's all I want to do. But if we don't do it, it will be just 
like this deficit or just like a hangnail. It won't get any easier. 
Sooner or later we're going to have to do this. We ought to do it now. 
We ought to do it now.
    Let me say, I want this to be as grassroots a program as I can. The 
best, most popular thing we've done, when people know about it, is 
national service, because the Government provides the money and sets the 
goals and people at the local level decide how to organize all these 
young people to solve problems. That's a lot of what we're trying to do 
with health care. I don't want the Government to take it over. I want to 
leave the private insurance system in place. I want people at the State 
and local level to decide how to do it. But you have to have some rules 
that say how everybody is going to be covered and some way of organizing 
folks so small business can get a break. You have to do that.
    And I say to you, I don't think we'd have a chance to do that if 
Dick Gephardt weren't so dedicated to it. And if we had about 10 more 
folks in both parties in both Houses that dedicated, there wouldn't be a 
chance that we wouldn't do it. And I wouldn't even have to give a speech 
about it tonight.
    But what we have to decide on health care and crime and welfare 
reform and all these other issues that face us is whether it's going to 
be a talking deal--either way you get your dog back--or whether it's 
going to be about doing something, not trying to box our opponents into 
extreme positions and covering ourselves with labels but looking at the 
reality.
    Back in the Middle Ages, the great Italian political philosopher 
Machiavelli said that there

[[Page 1143]]

is nothing so difficult in all of human affairs than to change the 
established order of things. Because, he said, people who will be 
adversely affected by the change know it, and they'll fight you like 
crazy. He didn't use those words, but I'm freely translating. [Laughter] 
My Italian is not that bad. But he said, on the other hand, the people 
who will benefit are always somewhat uncertain about what the change 
will be, and therefore, they won't bring themselves into the fight with 
the same gusto as those who are afraid of the change. So it always is 
difficult to change.
    But we know that America is around here after 214 years and more 
because we always changed when we had to, because we have this capacity 
to be faithful to our values and our Constitution and our institutions, 
but to change. And that's what he hired on for, and that's why I ran for 
President.
    I had a good life, and I was as happy as I'd ever been in my life 
the day I entered the race for President. And everybody told me that my 
happiest days might be behind me. [Laughter] But I did not want to see 
my child grow up in a country where things were coming apart when they 
ought to be coming together. I did not want her to be part of the first 
generation of Americans to do worse than their parents. And I did not 
believe that we were incapable of solving these problems.
    So I say to you tonight, my fellow Americans, we glorify Harry 
Truman today because he made us face our problems, and he said what he 
thought. Everybody talks about how much they miss him. I came from a 
family that was for him when he was alive. [Laughter] And you know what 
I'm talking about--we all--you know, he's practically a saint now in 
America. But when he was alive he was usually low in the polls for 
telling inconvenient truth and trying to get people to face up to their 
responsibilities at a time when we were tired of it. I mean, it was at 
the end of the war, and we'd been through all that, and nobody wanted to 
face all that.
    We cannot be tired today. We have a lot to do. At the end of the 
cold war we're faced with a whole set of challenges and opportunities 
that are different. And our children's lives will be measured by the 
extent to which we choose to do and to pull together, instead of to talk 
and to divide. We got to where we are today by being a nation of 
believers and doers.
    Dick Gephardt, your Congressman, is one of our finest believers and 
doers. Let the rest of us do as well on health care and all our 
challenges, and our country will go into the next century in great 
shape.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 7:44 p.m. in the St. Louis Ballroom at the 
Adams Mark Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to August Busch III, 
chairman and president, Anheuser-Busch, Inc.